Saturday is the fifth anniversary of states implementing shutdowns to curb the spread of COVID-19. The move sparked a disastrous, multi-year, multi-administration pandemic response that cost trillions of dollars, eroded public trust, and tanked student achievement — all without reducing deaths. By many metrics, the U.S. pandemic response was among the worst in the developed world.
Five years later, it’s clear the pandemic delivered several useful warnings. Remote learning exposed parents to the poisonous ideological indoctrination in school curricula. Censorship on social media alerted the public to the dangers posed to free speech by government-directed pushes to quash dissent. Deceptive behavior by international bodies, especially the World Health Organization, prompted the U.S. to reconsider their worth and place.
President Donald Trump acted upon retaking office. On Day One, he issued an executive order to withdraw the United States from WHO, which he attempted to do months before losing the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden. The move was a long overdue acknowledgment that membership in that corrupt organization, which is under the sway of China, is no longer in America’s interests. The order cites WHO’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China” and the “inappropriate political influence of WHO member states” as cause for the withdrawal, as well as the “onerous payments” the organization demanded of the U.S. It is emphatically correct on each count.
From the outset of COVID-19, WHO parroted the talking points of the Chinese Communist Party, which came at great cost to the global pandemic response. On Jan. 14, 2020, WHO’s X account, then Twitter, relying entirely on information from the Chinese government, posted that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” Of course, this wasn’t true — reports later surfaced that Chinese scientists were aware of this. But WHO, under the leadership of Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, whose close ties to China helped him secure the post in 2017, repeated the CCP’s claims without challenge.
WHO also promoted the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origin, meaning it jumped from animals to humans, based solely on Chinese evidence. On Jan. 9, 2020, Ghebreyesus echoed the Chinese line about the virus being linked to the exotic food market in Wuhan before doubling down a month later by flagging the market as a “point of amplification” despite a lack of evidence. Additionally, the WHO-China mission in mid-February, a report co-authored by WHO experts, concluded that a lab origin was “extremely unlikely.”
Not only was the evidence for these assertions extremely light at the time, but ample evidence has emerged that Chinese officials were well aware of the likelihood of a lab leak at the time. A bombshell report by ProPublica in 2022 detailed the whole-of-government Chinese response to a major biocontainment incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology shortly before the virus began circulating. The incident caused so much alarm within the Chinese government that Chinese President Xi Jinping intervened, which was highly unusual. The conclusions of the report, that the virus escaped from the biosafety level 3 lab in Wuhan and that Chinese officials scrambled to cover it up, have never been refuted — and the lab leak is now the accepted theory of COVID-19’s origin by the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Energy’s elite “Z Division,” which exists to track foreign weapons of mass destruction.
And yet, as all of this unfolded, Ghebreyesus publicly praised China’s “transparency” and “leadership” and delayed WHO’s declaration of a “pandemic” until March 11, 2020, long after it was clear to the world what it was. This afforded China breathing room to control the narrative and evade global scrutiny.
The reasons why China would use every means at its disposal, including its influence at WHO, to minimize its culpability in the pandemic are obvious. But why WHO would be so eager to help is less so.
However, smoking gun evidence of collusion is unnecessary to justify the U.S.’s decision to withdraw. WHO, which receives 16% of its funding from the U.S., more than three times the amount of any other nation, has long pushed a progressive agenda on abortion, climate change, and gender that is out of step with American values. As such, it is no longer the vehicle for advancing American priorities that it once was.
LAB LEAK CONFIRMATION ENDS THE ERA OF NOBLE COVID-19 LIES
Leaving WHO does not mean the U.S. should abandon the cause of global health. The executive order tasks the secretary of state to “identify credible and transparent United States and international partners to assume necessary activities previously undertaken by the WHO.” Indeed, the U.S. must endeavor to lead global health from outside of WHO, possibly by spearheading a brand-new entity.
U.S. leadership starts with U.S. priorities.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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